kirtu wrote:Increased demand due to industrial sources (so not necessarily industrial growth) is exponential or a higher order polynomial function than the human induced function.

Well that can't be true and in fact the Wikipedia article that I referenced states that annual worldwide increased energy demand from industrial sources is something like 10.6%. So industrial energy demand is something like 11 times the increase in population demand annually (but that;s got to be off a bit as about 2/3 energy consumption in the US is broadly industrial) and worldwide industrial demand is something > 9 times energy demand from the population.

I was thinking that the industrial demand coefficient would have been closer to 2 or that a low exponent would have been possible. But it can't really be. So actually annual energy demand increase from all sources is linear. Humanity can if fact provide energy nearly indefinitely even with coal and oil running out although it will require quite a shift in energy production. From an engineering perspective this is straightforward.

However we lack the worldwide political leadership as all societies worldwide are flatout leadership failures. Perhaps if Germany continues to hit their renewable goals more rational nations like the Scandinavian countries, New Zealand, maybe Canada, maybe the more rational North African countries will get on board and become bastions of civilization.

If individuals are not the cause of energy consumption, then on whose behalf is the energy being consumed?

Industry.

Sorry, that makes no sense. Are you seriously suggesting that industry is independent of human population? If that were the case, the extinction of the human species would be good for business - industry would no longer have to waste money on feeding people and could get down to the serious business of producing widgets for consumers. Oh, wait a second...

Granted the energy consumtion function for industry will be a higher-order function than the population growth function, since it is a product of both population growth and increasing lifestyle demands. But to suggest that population growth is not a factor in industrial consumption is absurd.

Every single joule of energy consumed by industry is consumed on behalf of the consumers of the industry's products.

KeithBC wrote:Sorry, that makes no sense. Are you seriously suggesting that industry is independent of human population? If that were the case, the extinction of the human species would be good for business - industry would no longer have to waste money on feeding people and could get down to the serious business of producing widgets for consumers. Oh, wait a second...

If individuals are not the cause of energy consumption, then on whose behalf is the energy being consumed?

Industry.

Sorry, that makes no sense. Are you seriously suggesting that industry is independent of human population?

Industry consumes 8-10 times the energy that the population consumes. And yes, much of industrial production is independent of the human population. To a large (but as yet unquantified extent) industrial activity is performed without essential consumer consumption in mind. Industrial activity is being performed largely for it's own sake, in order to make money. The consumption effect is not a major component (well, it is likely to be < 60% and of course that would be a major component if it were that high).

So I am claiming that some "essential" activity is worthless: weapons production for example. It is a necessary reality right now but it is worthless. Most widgets produced are not produced for the long term and have a planned obsolescence. If industry shifted to long term quality goods we would see a major change.

Granted the energy consumtion function for industry will be a higher-order function than the population growth function, since it is a product of both population growth and increasing lifestyle demands. But to suggest that population growth is not a factor in industrial consumption is absurd.

I am claiming that industrial growth is not tied to population increase at least in the 1st and probably much of the 2nd world. People exist as disposable workers for industry in order to sell widgets to other businesses for non-essential consumptive activity.

justsit wrote:The point was to highlight the unsustainable nature of huge population increase in terms of impact on the environment, not to question the fact that population is increasing.

How long can we keep keep increasing population, given the fact that energy use is increasing proportionately and resources are not infinite?

My idea was that the answer to Your question is in the United Nations world population estimates. It is a work of leading scientists of the field and it gives the projected increase of population till the year 2100. It doesn't project a huge collapse of civilisation. http://esa.un.org/wpp/unpp/panel_population.html

Although the energy sources are limited, they are truly vast. It depends on your thinking, try to imagine the vastness of solar energy, vastness of geothermal energy, etc.. Don't create mental projections of insufficiency, based on negative ideas, based on ignorance about the real existing sources of energy. Imagine a world that succesfully solves all these (imaginary and real) problems.

KeithBC wrote:You are entitled to your opinion, but you have yet to convince me of its non-absurdity.

Please consider the massive US military/industrial complex which is larger than all the rest of the world combined. Granted that the US is a special case, but the US has replicated the great mistake of the USSR in creating a bifurcated military/civilian economy. All of that effort, in an ideal world, is total economic waste (even if it produces valuable technology spinoffs although it is not the only engine to do so). Even in a non-ideal, realistic post-9/11 world at good deal of that total production is a form of waste driven by the extreme risk averse and paranoid hysteria that overtook the US after 9/11. It's true that the defense component of the US budget is only 19% but this spending has a multiplicative effect as large and small businesses devote their resources to various and plentiful DOD contracts. General Dynamics, for example, is still building submarines and Boeing (primarily) is still building fighters. All of this is non-productive. If we were to devote those resources to a rational defense program and take a peace dividend then we could change US society for the better (if there were political leadership for this, which unfortunately there is not - the US is as leaderless and incompetent as the Palestinians ) instead of feeding the infamous US wartime economy that we have been on most of my life and continuously since Reagan.

Aemilius wrote:My idea was that the answer to Your question is in the United Nations world population estimates. It is a work of leading scientists of the field and it gives the projected increase of population till the year 2100. It doesn't project a huge collapse of civilisation. http://esa.un.org/wpp/unpp/panel_population.html

Although the energy sources are limited, they are truly vast. It depends on your thinking, try to imagine the vastness of solar energy, vastness of geothermal energy, etc.. Don't create mental projections of insufficiency, based on negative ideas, based on ignorance about the real existing sources of energy. Imagine a world that succesfully solves all these (imaginary and real) problems.

Frankly, I am extremely dubious of projections by "leading scientists." They are frequently wrong; cf, Deepwater Horizon. The UN link appears to be broken.

Just because solar, geothermal, etc. energy sources are "vast" doesn't mean there is the political will or economic incentive or technology to (1)access them and (2)make them available to the general population any time in the near future. Sure, there are a lot of things that are possible...doesn't mean they're going to happen.

justsit wrote:Just because solar, geothermal, etc. energy sources are "vast" doesn't mean there is the political will or economic incentive or technology to (1)access them and (2)make them available to the general population any time in the near future. Sure, there are a lot of things that are possible...doesn't mean they're going to happen.

There is also the issue of converting trillions of dollars of infrastructure to use the new technology.

Like I said before, North America's highway systems probably can't be maintained with solar and wind powered trucks, nevermind all the tar and asphalt that goes into them.

KeithBC wrote:You are entitled to your opinion, but you have yet to convince me of its non-absurdity.

Please consider the massive US military/industrial complex which is larger than all the rest of the world combined. Granted that the US is a special case, but the US has replicated the great mistake of the USSR in creating a bifurcated military/civilian economy. All of that effort, in an ideal world, is total economic waste (even if it produces valuable technology spinoffs although it is not the only engine to do so). Even in a non-ideal, realistic post-9/11 world at good deal of that total production is a form of waste driven by the extreme risk averse and paranoid hysteria that overtook the US after 9/11. It's true that the defense component of the US budget is only 19% but this spending has a multiplicative effect as large and small businesses devote their resources to various and plentiful DOD contracts. General Dynamics, for example, is still building submarines and Boeing (primarily) is still building fighters. All of this is non-productive. If we were to devote those resources to a rational defense program and take a peace dividend then we could change US society for the better (if there were political leadership for this, which unfortunately there is not - the US is as leaderless and incompetent as the Palestinians ) instead of feeding the infamous US wartime economy that we have been on most of my life and continuously since Reagan.

However, even in the Paranoid States of America, the government is still "We, the people", and if you, the people, decided to stop doing that, it would stop. None of that activity is independent of population. Even a wartime economy is consumer-driven.

justsit wrote:How long can we keep keep increasing population, given the fact that energy use is increasing proportionately and resources are not infinite?

In terms of energy consumption - it will take the world population ~74 years to double their energy demand. But the growth in world industrial energy demand is around 10% annually which means that industrial energy demand will double in just over 7 years.

As for population growth, here is a UN projection. I have extracted the first two paragraphs of the executive summary:

Long-range population projections are reported to 2300, covering twice as long a period as ever covered in previous United Nations projections. These projections are not done by major area and for selected large countries (China and India), as was the previous practice, but for all countries of the world, providing greater detail.

In these projections, world population peaks at 9.22 billion in 2075. Population therefore grows slightly beyond the level of 8.92 billion projected for 2050 in the 2002 Revision, on which these projections are based. However, after reaching its maximum, world population declines slightly and then resumes increasing, slowly, to reach a level of 8.97 billion by 2300, not much different from the projected 2050 figure.

In these projections, world population peaks at 9.22 billion in 2075. Population therefore grows slightly beyond the level of 8.92 billion projected for 2050 in the 2002 Revision, on which these projections are based. However, after reaching its maximum, world population declines slightly and then resumes increasing, slowly, to reach a level of 8.97 billion by 2300, not much different from the projected 2050 figure.

I think such projections are all too unrealistic.

Again, related to peak oil, if there is not the lifeblood of industry available, then population levels supported by industrialization will be impossible to maintain.

Aemilius wrote:My idea was that the answer to Your question is in the United Nations world population estimates. It is a work of leading scientists of the field and it gives the projected increase of population till the year 2100. It doesn't project a huge collapse of civilisation. http://esa.un.org/wpp/unpp/panel_population.html

Although the energy sources are limited, they are truly vast. It depends on your thinking, try to imagine the vastness of solar energy, vastness of geothermal energy, etc.. Don't create mental projections of insufficiency, based on negative ideas, based on ignorance about the real existing sources of energy. Imagine a world that succesfully solves all these (imaginary and real) problems.

Frankly, I am extremely dubious of projections by "leading scientists." They are frequently wrong; cf, Deepwater Horizon. The UN link appears to be broken.

Just because solar, geothermal, etc. energy sources are "vast" doesn't mean there is the political will or economic incentive or technology to (1)access them and (2)make them available to the general population any time in the near future. Sure, there are a lot of things that are possible...doesn't mean they're going to happen.

The correct link http://esa.un.org/wpp/unpp/panel_population.htm There are several things happening at the moment. You can look at it in terms of how much money is invested in these energy sources, in the development of their technologies, etc... It is a fast growing field of business and technology, their growth rates have been like 2000% per year!As I have said before in this thread, the Second World War proves that the alternative energy technologies can be built very fast, when necessary.

Not so - the DWH reports were rosy and wrong. From the start many scientists with limited access to data (in one impressive case, just limited video feed from broadcast news) pushed back on the DWH media reports and provided alternative analysis and estimates. These proved more correct and forced BP to open their process up. Additionally there were marine biologists all over the Gulf region who reported direct observations that contradicted many of the DWH reports. The DWH disaster was a shining moment for science actually uncovering exaggeration (and IMHO spin on a criminal level).

The limited video feed from broadcast news for example resulted in an estimate of oil leakage in excess of what BP was reporting. This was a devastating result for BP esp. when more than one engineer came up with similar estimates literally just from analysis of video that BP had released.

Secondly, in a more controversial incident, there was a report, purportedly from marine biologists associated with a group viewed as a somewhat sketchy environmental group (please remember that even Jacques Cousteau was occasionally viewed by some as a "sketchy environmentalist"!), that BP was burning oil slicked seaweed clumps. These seaweed clumps are often the homes of endangered sea turtles so some sea turtles were being burned to death. BP did not address this report directly but merely explained why they had burned the clumps and flatly said that that action was discontinued.

Science and scientists saved the DWH disaster from being much worse than it could have been.

My reference to Deepwater Horizon was directed to the basis of the disaster, not the follow up. Scientists believed that the blowout preventer was fail safe. They were wrong.

"The immediate causes of the well blowout can be traced to a series of identifiable, preventable human and engineering mistakes made by BP, Halliburton, and Transocean that reveal such systematic failures in risk management that they place in doubt the safety culture of the entire industry. As offshore drilling took place in ever-deeper waters, safety precautions did not keep pace. Response plans to such a spill were inadequate, and had barely evolved since the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska. Deepwater energy exploration and production, particularly at the frontiers of experience, involve risks for which neither industry nor government has been adequately prepared, but for which they can and must be prepared in the future. What went wrong in the broader context is that as the oil and gas industry moved down to depths of a thousand feet or more without having adjusted its response capability and/or its containment technology, to manage those new risks. At the time of the blowout, BP, and industry more generally, had no proven options for rapid containment in deep water other than attempting to close the blowout preventer. They just thought it couldn’t happen." (bold mine)

I had some time to kill this morning (actually I didn't have the time but I managed to kill it anyway) so I generated a set of neural nets using an old neural net tool that I have to estimate population growth. All the nets had sufficient predictive power for the short term (so a decade or two out) just based on historical population data. However this data alone is just sufficient for regression analysis (fitting a curve to data) and is just reliable for short term population projection. The next step is to factor in fertility rates and birth rates from the UN data. Hopefully this will show the population curve levelling off as the UN claims in the middle and best scenario.

So there were sixteen data elements (I replicated this data three times to provide a training set, a test set and a production set - with these few data points you have to use the data you have on hand for training and testing):1804 1 B1924 2 B2012.1945 (March 15 or so 2012) 7 B+ the UN data here

This is a backpropagation network with multiple strategies (those functions, linear, Gausian, tanh, etc) for "squashing" the data and reducing the error to fit the output to the observed data.

The second net is a polynomial net that was independently invented by Ivakhnenko and Barron. This is also called a GMDH (Group Method of Data Handling) network.

Interestingly, although it overshoots the data slightly (but pretty consistently) it looks like a better predictor overall. However the data below is from the somewhat exotic first net I presented because it seems to have less overall error.

Now these are basically back of the envelop calculations just with primitive neural networks:

Below the Earth's crust is a layer of hot and molten rock called magma. Heat is continually produced there, mostly from the decay of the naturally radioactive materials such as uranium and potassium. The amount of heat within the 10 000 meters (about 33 000 feet) of Earth's surface contains 50 000 times more energy than all the oil and natural gas sources in the world.

Aemilius wrote:Below the Earth's crust is a layer of hot and molten rock called magma. Heat is continually produced there, mostly from the decay of the naturally radioactive materials such as uranium and potassium. The amount of heat within the 10 000 meters (about 33 000 feet) of Earth's surface contains 50 000 times more energy than all the oil and natural gas sources in the world.

The largest problem with geothermal is hydrogen sulphide. It corrodes any pipes put down and eats away at your generating equipment. Even in spots where the energy is almost at the surface it makes the sites unprofitable. I learned this on my last vacation. I stayed with a bunch of geothermal engineers on a project in the middle of the jungle. Don't invest in geothermal. The Germans don't even have an affordable solution to this problem yet.

I think I am becoming a convert to nuclear power. We need to go all in on researching more advanced nuclear reactor technologies.

Halliburton knew the cement they supplied would fail. It failed in their own tests. If it had met the engineering requirements Deepwater would have been safe.